On Prison

The Atlanticposted an interesting excerpt from “A Question of Freedom,” the memoir of R. Dwayne Betts, a poet and former Atlantic intern, about the nine years he served in prison, for carjacking. The excerpt is full of details of prison life—the improvised means of trading and communication, the cruel living conditions, the yearning—that paint an all-too-familiar, disarming picture of the life of an inmate. What makes this piece particularly interesting, aside from the natural and forthright style, is Betts’s chosen coping mechanism: books.

Two days after my birthday, I was on the door yelling for a book when someone threw The Black Poets by Dudley Randall under my cell door. James Baldwin said that people are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. The poets in Randall’s book were telling the history in shades of gray, telling the stories I never found in schoolbooks. Everybody has a book they say has changed their life— a book that made them more than they were before they picked it up. There was something within the pages of that tiny poetry anthology that moved me.

Randall’s book covers a long timeline, from slave songs through the nineteen-sixties. Its intention, he writes in the introduction, is to show the progress of black poets through American history. For a poet stuck in uniform circumstances, where any progress was virtually impossible, except the internal progress one fosters by reading and writing and thinking, a book about growth through poetry must have seemed a revelation. Since his release, Betts has proved to be unstoppable.

Betts’s poem “Ghazal,” published last year in Ploughshares, makes good use of the form’s repetitive strength. Read his discussion of that poem and other influences.

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